Pride, Revenge, and Honor (essay)

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The Declaration of Independence, our great national treasure, concludes with this statement: “for the support of this declaration … we mutually pledge … our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, of course John Hancock, and the other signers actually meant this; it’s not just great rhetoric, a fitting conclusion to a significant statement, but a meaningful and personal commitment made with full knowledge that all of them, each of them, might indeed be called upon to forfeit all their property, their very lives, and, as they said, their “sacred honor.”

This last phrase is not one we use in ordinary discourse today (although it has recently been the theme of a demonstration in Washington [Oct 30, 2010]). We know very well what we might mean if we were to pledge to some cause everything we own, our fortunes; we understand too what promising to give our lives for a cause – if necessary – would be. But exactly what would it mean to pledge our honor, our sacred honor at that? What would that have meant to the signers of the Declaration of Independence?

We also understand that our property is not sacred. Even our lives are not what you could call “sacred.” So what would be our individual, our personal “honor” that could legitimately be described as “sacred”?

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Perhaps many of us are not in a good position to say what a claim of sacredness would mean, so let us leave that part of the discussion aside. What about “honor,” though?

When we hear, “Labor Day was established to honor working men and women,” and when we read, “Honor thy father and mother,” we know what those sentences mean. To “honor” someone or something is to publically show our deep respect.

The Boy Scout oath says: “On my honor, I will do my best …”. And when we have made a promise to someone else, we would understand as correct a claim that we are “honor-bound” to keep that promise. We would also have a pretty good idea what it would mean to describe an individual’s behavior as “dishonorable” or a man or woman as an “honorable” person. We may even have sworn at some time in school to obey by an “honor system” like the military academies.

These common uses of the concept of honor have to do with responsibility to others and trustworthiness. But in 1776 the signers apparently meant more than merely that they would keep their word to give their fortunes and – if they had to – their lives for the cause of independence from Great Britain. In other words, that final phrase could not simply have meant: “and when we say we are pledged, we really mean it,” could it? Honor in the conclusion of the Declaration seems to refer to something just as real to them as their fortunes and their lives.

The concept of honor, as used in the Declaration, is related both to a sense of responsibility and to a public avowal of respect, and one’s honor was as real and concrete in that period and culture as one’s life and property.

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Revenge is easier for us to define. If someone harms you, you may feel justified in seeking to punish that person by harming her or him in return. “An eye for an eye” is a statement in support of revenge as an ethic.

If you pursue harm to someone who has harmed you, you do so because you feel “you owe it to yourself” to do so. Also, revenge is sought in order to demonstrate to the public that a person or a group may not get away with hurting you without being punished for that offense.

If we think about it, we can see that the concept of honor is relevant to the concept of revenge. Honor has to do with what one justly owes to oneself. And one’s honor has a very real public dimension; it has to do with what you think of yourself and what you expect others to think of you. What we hear of in other parts of the world as “honor killings” seems to fit in here in some way.

Many of us today feel that pursuing revenge is unworthy of “good people.” We might say that for many today, seeking revenge is, ironically, dishonorable.

When an impersonal system of social justice replaced a revenge-based culture in ancient Greece – as played out in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy – this was recognized as a major step in the progress of civilization. For Christians, who take the New Testament seriously, replacing “an eye for an eye” with “turn the other cheek” was seen as a significant moral advance. We feel superior to the many-generation feud in the hills of Kentucky and West Virginia between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Today, we would even criticize an individual that has been robbed who seeks revenge by beating up the robber. We would say it is wrong “to take the law into one’s own hands” in such a case, and even more so in the case of an anti-abortionist who murders an abortion doctor. Revenge is an ignoble motive for us and may even be against our laws.

Revenge is a form of justice, and a person may in fact feel avenged when the robber who stole from him or her is sent to jail through a society’s justice system. Even though we all seek justice, we denigrate pursuit of personal revenge, because revenge is a crude form of justice based only on force and not on law.

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We have seen that revenge has to do with what one owes to oneself and honor has a significant public dimension. Pride seems to be involved in both one’s attempt to defend one’s honor as well as in one’s felt need for personal revenge if harm is done to him or to his group.

Your pride is threatened by a personal affront such as theft of your goods. Your pride may be restored by an act of revenge.

Your pride leads you to stand up for yourself when your goods, person, family, or values are attacked or injured, reinforcing your sense of self-worth and your honor.

Pride is stronger than mere self-esteem and, in the sense we are using the term here, is very different from personal vanity. Pride can be a strong motivating force in one’s life, as an individual pursues pride in her or his accomplishments or celebrates the status and strength of a group with which one feels identified.

It is this group identification that apparently links pride to the other key elements of a system of honor, although there are many other ways in which one’s pride may be a potent force outside the scope of this rumination.

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We learn from historians and sociologists that when there is no reliable system of law, which makes it impossible to look to society as a whole to insure that justice is done, then the individual feels it necessary to look to his or her own action to maintain justice. In fact, a system of honor is sometimes contrasted with a system of laws.

A system of honor grows up in situations in which there is no dependable external force maintaining order, no policing or military force whose legitimacy or power one is willing to recognize. It is loyalty to one’s sense of self, to an extended family or clan, to a tribe, a social class, a religious sect, or a particular culture that drives one’s pursuit of honor, justice or revenge, and pride.

When America was still beginning to develop as a society, in the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, since individuals seem to have felt that the systems of social order in place at that time were not always dependable, a rough justice was often established through dependence on people’s honor, as we can see in the fact that dueling - a personal defense of one's sacred honor - only very gradually declined in early nineteenth-century American culture. (The famous duel when Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton, one of our Founding Fathers, occurred in 1804.)

Today, we can see honor systems driving unempowered and impoverished peoples, from the Middle East to Los Angeles (and all the other cities with powerful gangs), from Congo to New Guinea. A gang member may murder someone who is considered to have “disrespected” that individual, in other words to have wounded his honor. But such a system – or code – was still strong enough to tie our late eighteenth-century patriots together as they undertook their most treacherous endeavor in 1776.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence were proud men seeking to establish a social system of just laws, bound to their cause by a real sense of their sacred honor.

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